The Shrum Curse

Robert Shrum

Robert Shrum, who was for three decades among the most prominent Democratic political consultants in the country, never mastered the exigencies of everyday life. He grew up in Los Angeles but does not drive; he is best known as a speechwriter but does not type. Since 2000, he has spent his summers at a house on Cape Cod, but his complexion seldom appears other than pasty or sunburned. Over the years, Shrum effectively turned himself into a machine for campaigning, and then, suddenly, after the 2004 election, he turned the machine off. “I thought it was time to move on,” Shrum said the other day over lunch downtown. “I’d been doing it long enough.”

There was also, of course, the matter of the “Shrum curse.” In his last contest, Shrum served as the chief strategist for John Kerry, the eighth time he had worked for a Democratic Presidential candidate and his eighth loser. In lieu of a candidate, Shrum has this summer produced a memoir, “No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner,” a dishy recounting of his career. Page for page, notwithstanding the title, the book probably has more excuses than concessions, and there are revealing, and often unflattering, glimpses of his former clients: a foulmouthed Edmund Muskie, a dithering Bob Kerrey, and a lightweight John Edwards, among others. In all, though, Shrum, who is sixty-four years old, takes on the subject of the curse without actually acknowledging its existence.

“At a personal level, I don’t believe in the ‘Shrum curse,’ ” he said. “I had some influence and importance and a great vantage point, but the elections are always about the candidates, not the consultants.” Still, confronting his first Presidential election in more than a generation as merely an interested outsider, Shrum shows that he has retained more than a few tics of the political trade. There is, for example, the criticism masquerading as praise, as when he says, “I happen to like Hillary Clinton.” Shrum has had an uneasy relationship with the Clintons dating back to the McGovern campaign in 1972, on which both the future President and the consultant worked. “Bill is now the rock star of the Democratic Party, but he didn’t get to be a great President,” Shrum said. “He was reëlected without asking for a mandate to do anything big, and he didn’t get anything big done as President.” Notably, Clinton was elected and reëlected without any help from Shrum.

Shrum’s ambivalence toward the former President extends to his wife. “Hillary wanted to lock up the race early, and she hasn’t done it,” he said. “Her lead in the national polls is irrelevant. It’s all about what happens in the early primary states. She’s redefining change as nostalgia. Her campaign is about building a bridge to the past, not the future, as her husband used to say.”

Shrum made his reputation as Senator Edward Kennedy’s speechwriter, most famously of his speech at the 1980 Democratic Convention. (“The hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”) Like many in his generation, Shrum pines for a Kennedy-like figure, and he believes that he may be seeing one in Barack Obama. “During the last couple of weeks, Obama’s been very interesting,” Shrum said, referring to the senator’s willingness to meet with foreign dictators and his tough talk about attacking Al Qaeda in Pakistan. “His maverick statements on foreign policy have been like what J.F.K. was saying in the late nineteen-fifties, and the reaction was the same: ‘He doesn’t know what he’s talking about, he’s naïve,’ etc. But maybe he’s just thinking ahead of everyone else.”

This time, Shrum won’t even watch the campaign unfold from Washington, where he and his wife, Marylouise Oates, were fixtures on the social circuit. They now split their time between the Cape and an apartment in the Village, where Shrum teaches policy analysis at New York University. (Washington’s booming real-estate market helped ease their semiretirement. They sold their house there to the Swiss government, moved to another, then sold that one to John Negroponte, who is now the Deputy Secretary of State.) Shrum had an outstanding record in statewide elections, winning thirty Senate races and ten governorships for the Democrats, but he realizes, with some melancholy, that the Presidential curse is likely to be his legacy. “To the extent I feel bad, it’s about what it’s meant for the country, not for me,” he said. “Al Gore should have been President on 9/11. If John Kerry had won, we’d be out of Iraq by now. These things matter a lot more than I do. I just wish I’d bent history a few more inches.” ♦

Jeffrey Toobin has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1993 and the senior legal analyst for CNN since 2002.